Over the seven seasons Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown have played together for the Boston Celtics, they have faced a wide variety of skepticism about their fit together as two ballhandling wings. Both were varying degrees of great at different times, but did their skill sets overlap too much to build a championship team around them as a pair?
The Celtics’ 2024 NBA championship win answers that question with a definitive “no,” but there were real questions about the pairing’s fit together over their near-decade as a duo, as well as calls from media and fans alike to trade Brown. Instead, the Celtics (somewhat controversially) continually doubled down on the twosome, most recently by giving Brown the most lucrative contract in NBA history last summer.
Doing so may seem like the easy call with the benefit of hindsight, but in the aftermath of the confetti falling, as the Celtics celebrated their 18th championship in franchise history and Brown lofted his NBA Finals MVP, there was a stat on the broadcast for anyone watching at home that demonstrated just how unprecedented Boston’s patience with the Brown and Tatum duo was (as captured by Tim Bontemps of ESPN):
For Tatum and Brown, the 107 games they played together before winning the title are the most by a duo prior to winning their first championship in NBA history.
That’s quite the astounding factoid, and it shows how rare it is for any two NBA players to
- be good enough to justify keeping together that long, period, and…
- be good enough to maintain faith in despite not having won a title together yet.
It remains to be seen if this record will ever be broken, but given the constant roster churn of today’s NBA, it seems unlikely. Maybe Brown and Tatum’s long-awaited success will convince more GMs to remain patient with various star pairings, but this otherwise seems primed to be a record Brown and Tatum can hold together for a long time.
